Ever been to a brand campaign case study presentation at one of those big-name health care marketing conferences? You know, where the brand man-ager and agency lead get up in front of theaudience and show off their brilliant newTV/digital/mobile/social/(insert medi-um here) campaign with all its bells andwhistles? Where they talk about all thecreative awards they won, all the visits totheir new Website, their friends on Face-book or followers on Twitter, the down-loads of their hot new app? How they gotC-suite and LMR buy-in, and the docsand patients are ecstatic, and this is theway to create an integrated, multichannelcampaign in the digital age? And handsgo up at the end of this spectacular lightshow, and after a couple of softballs someguy in the back says something like, “Um,this is all very impressive, but do you haveany direct measurement of its actual im-pact on sales?”And the answer, if there is an answer, isbafflingly vague?

One of the extraordinary quirks of
health care marketing today is the fact
that, in an industry whose products are
as evidence-based as anything that exists
in the marketplace, the evidence supporting corresponding marketing campaigns
remains surprisingly thin. The considerable majority of pharmaceutical brands,
some of which have marketing budgets in
the seven- and eight-figure range, do little
or nothing to confirm the efficacy of each
element of their marketing campaigns –
to see if this or that or the other app or
Website or TV ad is having an actual,
provable impact on new prescriptions.

Even after fifteen years in the industry,
this state of affairs remains a mystery to
me. In practically every other consumer-facing industry out there, marketers go to
a great deal of trouble to pre-define key
performance indicators, to tie marketing
campaigns to specific consumer behaviors, to gauge a programs’ success and
optimize it accordingly. But among pharmaceutical brands, this sort of research is
very much the exception rather than the
rule.

And the potential cost of this continuing mystery is only rising. Fifteen years
ago, when DTC only meant a TV commercial or print ad campaign, one could
make relatively sound assumptions
based on the sales patterns that followed
the launch of that one commercial or one
print ad. But we are moving into the tapestry era of marketing now; the modern
pharmaceutical brand should be touch-ing the consumer in a growing variety of
places and media. If we don’t know which
of those touchpoints are driving positive
action and which aren’t, we are just flying blind, and doing so at great expense.

Folks do certainly keep track of the low-hanging fruit numbers – page visits,
clicks, downloads, open rates, numbers of
likes. But knowing that my brand’s Facebook page grew from 10,000 to 20,000
likes last year tells me precisely nothing
of substance about the real success of my
campaign – to understand the impact of
all the components of our campaigns, we
need to be following the path of causation
straight from marketing touchpoint all
the way to new prescription.

Unfortunately there seems to be a
large-scale belief prevailing in our industry that this sort of thing is not possible, or
at least not possible without some sort of
outrageous investment. Not so. The tools
exist today to calculate return on investment for virtually any pharmaceutical
brand marketing campaign component
to an increasingly granular level, and do
so at a fraction of the total cost of a typical
brand campaign.

How?

The first step is to find an analytics
partner with end to end capabilities. We
at Intouch use a company called Cros-six, but others are out there. The partner
must have access to broad-scope prescription data from a variety of sources,
and the capability to tie names and locations at one end of the marketing path
to prescriptions at the other, usually
through relationships with payers which
permit blinded data matching. Due to the
limitations of HIPAA, such a data partner
would never be able to ask a payer, “
Person X visited my website last month – can
you tell me if that person filled a script
for my brand?” But what they CAN do is
submit a list of names to payers, and get a
response by percentage – say, 20 percent
of the names you submitted filled new
prescriptions for your brand last month.
Thus a raw measure of campaign efficacy
can be calculated with the privacy of individual patients still protected.

Next is calculating the lifetime value of
a new patient. Learning the real ROI of a
campaign doesn’t just mean finding out
how many dollars it brought in this week
or this month or this year. You need to
know the present value of each of those
new patient acquisitions over a lifetime.
Almost as mysterious to me as the lack of
interest in ROI among health care marketers is the lack of interest in the lifetime
value of new prescriptions. But that’s the
only way to really understand the ROI of
any campaign – if your data partner can
tie marketing touchpoints to new starts
and you know the lifetime value of each
new start, then you have a true ROI.

Next, you have to start at the groundlevel of every campaign component withthe calculation of ROI in mind. Whatevercall to action is included in your cam-paign must be able, through some avail-able pathway, to tie back to sales. For ex-ample, if your brand is running a seriesof programmatic media campaigns on-line, each campaign should have its ownunique linkbacks to wherever you aredriving its targets, and that place shouldbe tagged by your data partner for collec-tion of information about every personwho clicks through. This is not the sortof thing that can be done after the fact –it needs to be a part of the brickwork ofeach campaign. But if it is done, the Cros-sixes of the world will be able to tease outhow many of those click-throughs are ex-isting patients, how many are becomingnew patients, and how many of each aretied to each discrete campaign.

As might be imagined, the forward
march of technology is making all this
easier every day. Facebook, for example,
recently launched a new platform that
can literally follow its users – not just
within Facebook properties but outside
Facebook and across devices. So there is
no excuse for any brand with a Facebook
page – branded or unbranded – to not be
tracking the ROI of that page.

This doesn’t just apply to digital campaigns, though. A good data partner will
have access to set-top box information as
well – will be able to tie viewings of your
brand’s TV commercial to prescription
activity, just as with the digital channels.
And with a little creative thinking, brands
can find ways to calculate real ROI for virtually any campaign imaginable.

The typical brand manager, worriedabout her shrinking budget already, isbound to ask, “How much is all this go-ing to cost?” But that is not really theright question. The right question is,“How much money am I wasting rightnow on campaign components that aren’tworking, or could be working better?”Campaign optimization is an often-over-looked component of ROI. In addition tocalculating dollars earned from each newprescription, we calculate dollars savedby gaining efficiencies. For example, fora mid-sized pharma client, we recentlytook over a pay-per-click campaign fromtheir media agency. By approaching itwith an eye for efficiency, we re-focusedthe campaign to be more about qualityover quantity. Intouch increased conver-sions by 63 percent and decreased costsby 41 percent. In other words, the clientended up spending much less money onthe program and got many more quali-fied leads. Whatever calculating ROImight cost in effort or out-of-pockets, thecost of unseen inefficiencies that pop upif you don’t do so are inevitably greater.That is why ROI is a part of every Intouchrecommendation possible – we as anagency always want to know if our cam-paigns are working, and how they mightwork better.

Sometimes I feel like the state of health
care marketing today is a bit like the state
of war in 1913. Back before the Great
War, people thought of war in terms
of pageantry and handsome uniforms
and flashing swords and mad cavalry
charges – of attaque à outrance, as the
French generals put it. Two world wars
and countless casualties later, military
leaders finally came around to the fact
that their strategy had to be placed on an
evidence basis, not an emotional one. We
as marketers are in the same position –
though, thankfully, without the millions
of casualties at stake. We can pursue the
pageantry – the pretty pictures and fancy
apps that look great in marketing conference presentations. Or we can figure out
what works.medadnews